Valerian Mazataud Le Devoir Le Régistan, a masterpiece of Muslim art, sits in the center of Samarkand.
In 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping launched the titanic New Silk Roads project, officially called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Ten years later, Le Devoir visited Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, two countries at the heart of these new trade routes. Last of eight travel diaries.
After traveling the new Silk Roads for two weeks, we chose Samarkand, the jewel city of the ancient Silk Roads, as our last stop. After returning from Namangan to Tashkent by road, we jump on a train which takes us, some 300 kilometers to the southwest, to Samarkand, an Uzbek city proclaimed a “crossroads of cultures” by UNESCO which, moreover, has it , inscribed on the coveted world heritage list.
Photo: Valérian Mazataud Le Devoir
Cumulating some 3000 years of history, Samarkand, founded by the Sogdians, was conquered, among others, by Alexander the Great, who settled in his citadel, Genghis Khan, who razed it to make it his own, and Tamerlane, who beautified it again, thus restoring its glory.
As soon as we arrive, even if night has already fallen, we head for Régistan, a place in the heart of the old city surrounded by three immense madrasas, each a masterpiece of Muslim art which, brought together in one same place, offer incomparable majesty. Through the darkness of the night, the lighting reveals the floral, stellar and animal motifs that adorn the facades of the three Koranic schools — Ulugh Beg, Cher-Dor and Tilla-Qari — built at different times, but presenting a united architectural ensemble. and certainly dazzling.
Photo: Valérian Mazataud Le Devoir
Inside the religious buildings, interior courtyards, just as flamboyant, with their ceramics decorating every interstice, immerse us in the radiant past of this city, which was for centuries at the heart of commercial exchanges between the East and the 'West. A fertile meeting place, where cultures, beliefs and knowledge intertwined before the merchants, loaded with silk or other goods, resumed their journey.
A museum city
Today, the city is filled with visitors from China, Russia, Central Asia and Europe, a sign of the country's recent opening to tourism. “Our president [Xi Jinping] told us that Uzbekistan is our friend. So we come to discover the country,” explains Tracy Lee, originally from Beijing.
Photo: Valérian Mazataud Le Devoir
Valerie, a 29-year-old Russian, walks through the “pearl of Uzbekistan” on the arm of her lover. “My husband has a friend who was born here. He told us to come to Samarkand and that we would never forget what we would see there,” she slips.
A frenzy that stuns Akbarjon, who sells souvenirs under the arches of the Gur Emir mausoleum. “I work every day, I can’t take a break because there are so many tourists. »
Our eyes have no rest either, constantly charmed by this museum city. First by the Shah-e-Zindeh necropolis, of stunning beauty, by the Gour Emir mausoleum, where the Turkish-Mongol conqueror Tamerlane rests under a 26 meter dome covered with gold leaf, by the Bibi- Khanoum which was for a time the largest in the world, and finally by the Ulugh Beg observatory, an astronomical research center which had no equal in the world in the 15th century.
Photo: Valérian Mazataud Le Devoir
And we then think back to this wish formulated by François-Bernard Huyghe in The Silk Road or the Empires of the Mirage: the Silk Roads are “proof of the interfertility of cultures,” he writes, “the symbol of a dialogue from the past from which the modern world could draw inspiration.” A dialogue perhaps lost over the centuries on paths traced by distrust rather than curiosity.
This report was financed with the support of the Journalism Fund international Transat-Le Devoir.